Personal electronic computing or communications devices are often lost or stolen. Since proprietary information is routinely stored on such devices, the need to protect such proprietary or sensitive data and to recover such devices is self-evident.
Laptops, and increasingly other electronic devices such as cell phones, PDAs, smart phones (e.g. Blackberry™, iPhone™), memory sticks, personal media devices (e.g. iPod™), gaming devices, tablet computers, electronic books and personal computers, are often remotely tracked so that they can be recovered in the event of theft. Such tracking may be effected by sending location information to a remote storage site, an email server or a personal mobile electronic device.
During communications with a tracked device, commands may be sent for data deletion, encryption, encryption key deletion, updating software, retrieving data, retrieving screen shots, retrieving camera shots, etc.
Tracking traditionally occurs intermittently, to avoid excessive bandwidth usage and to minimize the risk of being noticed by a thief. When a device is stolen between two such tracking communications, the owner or user of the device has to wait until the following tracking communication in order to trigger a security action, such as data delete, on the device.